Friday, February 5, 2010

Why pro-lifers should have supported the ERA

The original Equal Rights Amendment was simple- the law should have no gender differences.

A man makes his decision to become a father the instant he has consensual sex, at least, under the law. I should emphasize the word consensual; we're not talking about rape or incest here, we're talking about normal sex, inside of some form of committed relationship.

He can't back out past that point. Yet Roe V.Wade allows a woman to. This creates a difference in the law- a difference in parental rights.

Yeah, I know, women try to justify it with "It's my body and I have to give up 9 months of my life for the child". But I'm talking cusps here- the moment of decision. And the moment of decision, legally, should be the same for a man as for a woman.

And that moment shouldn't be *after* the fact.

Non-consensual sex, like incest and rape, isn't included in this. In fact, I consider abortion due to incest and rape to be murder- and the murderer to be the rapist, just as much as if a bank robber shot a pregnant woman in the uterus.

Life of the mother decisions also aren't really included in this- when a gun is held against your head in other circumstances, the law doesn't call your actions a choice, and neither should it for a woman whose life is threatened by a pregnancy.

Health of the child decisions are the pure evil of eugenics; just talk to any parent who lost a child in the first few weeks of life and ask if they had it to do over again would they choose abortion. You'll find even the tiniest, shortest, human lives have great meaning.

No, I'm solely talking about the evil of using abortion as backup birth control here- and that includes the overdose of birth control pills known as the morning after pill. If women TRULY want to be equal to men, then they need to accept that consensual sex, even with the use of modern birth control methods, contains the slight chance of a pregnancy- and that's the risk they take having consensual sex to begin with. The decision to be parents, is contained in the sex act itself; if you don't want to be a parent yet, don't have sex.

And that's the lesson we need to hammer in to all of our young people- male and female.--------------------------Correcting some logical assumption holes in the above, thanks to some questions I ran into on slashdot:

It's more the idea of the ERA- that we shouldn't be writing gender differences into law. Well, being allowed to choose whether or not you're going to be a parent after having sex is a HUGE gender difference- one which should not be allowed except in rare cases, and even those rare cases should be either the *sole* decision of an emergency room doctor or having the man involved prosecuted for murder, same as any other crime that causes the death of a fetus.

On the Eugenics is Pure Evil, I thought that was pretty much a given based on Godwin's law. But I can think of three reasons not related to facism, so here they are:1. For any given species to survive and evolve, it needs genetic diversity. Species that don't have genetic diversity have a tendency to run into trouble with double recessive and double dominant genes. Eugenics, in the search of the "perfect child", reduces genetic diversity.2. Who gets to decide what the perfect human looks like anyway? Parental achievement is no indication- many geniuses come from impoverished or even mental illness backgrounds. Many crooks come from upper crust backgrounds. There are no good indicators.3. The labeling of disabilities with good quality of life as preventable genetic diseases. A good example of this is Achondroplasia Dwafism, which is a rather benign form of dwarfism as long as your child isn't double-dominant; most Achondroplasia Dwarfs live long and happy lives. Yet it's on the list of normal human variety to be wiped out in the next generation by abortion.

The ERA was more than just about pay- it was about equal rights for both genders across the board.

The way abortion rights are currently, they're NOT equal- the woman has *all* the power legally (if not in fact) and the man has to make the choice whether to become a father or not *before conception*.

Yes, they got equal pay- and in the end, they got more than equal rights in many other ways.

"Health of the child decisions are the pure evil of eugenics; just talk to any parent who lost a child in the first few weeks of life and ask if they had it to do over again would they choose abortion. You'll find even the tiniest, shortest, human lives have great meaning."

I have talked to my mother, who lost her first child at the age of seven months. If she had it to do over again, she would absolutely have had an abortion rather than give birth to a child with an untreatable heart defect which made it impossible for her to to survive to her first birthday, and made her sick and miserable throughout her short life. You are an arrogant, patronizing, misogynistic jackwagon, and by spouting your ignorance you are shitting on my mother, every other woman who has suffered the kind of loss she did, and every woman who has chosen abortion over creating an inescapably short and pain-filled life.

You're also very confused about Godwin's Law. In it's original, descriptive form, it simply states that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 100%." In it's prescriptive form, it holds that a discussion ends when a Nazi analogy is made, with the writer who made the analogy being considered to have lost the argument, as you did by implicitly comparing legal abortion to the Nazi genocide campaign.